Apple made it available free of charge to anyone who purchased Mac on or after October 1, 2013. Everyone else can purchase it for $19.99 on the Mac App Store, which is pretty good for a fully-fledged word processor. As a tool for getting words on a page, it’s solid. It comes with a number of templates for academic writing. It starts sounding familiar to apps like iA Writer, WriteRoom and Byword. You must keep in mind that the word processor isn’t the tool keeping you from being able to crank out that perfect novel, blog post or tweet.

Before we start talking about the writing apps for Mac, let me make it clear, no writing app can improve your writing magically, that can only be achieved with a lot of practice. Having said that, using a good writing app will assist you in writing, so that you can get the words out of your mind and onto the proverbial paper. A good writing app does that by providing a writer with an aesthetically pleasing and easy to traverse work environment. It is also distraction free and helps you focus on what are you writing. Most importantly, it has all the essential features which are hidden when you are writing and only show up when you need them.

It also makes exporting your text as easy as writing them. Basically, it lets you focus on the art of writing itself and handles the rest. Now, no one app can fulfil all these criteria for everyone as each one of us follow a different form of writing. Some are bloggers and dabble in small-form writing while others are looking to write full-fledged novels. Some of us are aspiring scriptwriters while others are trying to complete their thesis and papers. That is why we have tried to include different apps which will suit different requirements. So, let’s find out the best writing apps for macOS you can get today: Best Apps for Novel or Blog Writing 1.

Ulysses Some apps are best suited for short-form writing while others focus more on the long-form content creation. Ulysses is the only app which is equally good at both of them. You can as easily write a novel on Ulysses as you can a blog post. Ulysses achieves this feat by creating a perfect amalgamation of features and usability. When you launch the app for the first time, you are greeted by an interface which is simple and yet so powerful. The interface is divided into three major panes. The left pane is called the Library which houses your main navigation area including folders, trash, and storage options.

If you are doing a fresh install of OS X on the SSD, which you should, you can use the setup assistant system when your Mac first reboots to the new install of OS X to copy all you files, including user accounts, settings and app over from your original standard hard drive that you put in the optical bay. How to format ssd for mac and install os.

You can choose to save the files on either iCloud drive or locally on Mac. You can even store files on other cloud storage spaces such as Dropbox using the external folder. The Middle pane is called sheets and holds all your individual documents. The right pane is the text editor and it’s where all the magic happens. At any given time, you can hide the panes and only use the text editor to get a distraction-free environment. The text-editor supports markdown formatting, meaning you can use certain symbols to format your text. The idea here is that a writer does not have to use anything other than the keyboard to interact with the app.

You can use different themes to customize the look and feel of Ulysses, I personally love to use it in the dark mode. One of my favourite features of Ulysses is its exporting capabilities. You can export any document into Text, PDF, HTML, ePub, and Docx formats. You can even link your WordPress and Medium account and directly publish your articles without living the app. Other features include goal setting, photo attachment, keyword search, and inbuilt notes. What makes Ulysses also good at long-form writing is its organisational structure. You can create a multi-hierarchal structure by nesting folders inside the folders.

The easy drag and drop tool to arrange the sheets is another feature which really comes in handy. There are a lot more features which we cannot cover, as this is not a full review, but know this, even though it is a costly software, it is worth every penny. I write all my articles on Ulysses and have no qualms in recommending this to anyone. Install: () 2. Scrivener While Ulysses does well in the long-form writing arena, Scrivener is surely the reigning king here. Don’t get me wrong, Ulysses does come really close but for someone whose sole focus is on creating lengthy content such as novels, Scrivener still remains the go-to tool. I will be the first to admit that Scrivener is not as intuitive as Ulysses and has a little bit of learning curve attached to it. You will at least need a couple of hours to get familiar with the interface while unlocking its full potential will require some serious usage.

The inbuilt tutorial does help a lot to learn the basics. When you launch the app, you will be asked to create a project. There are a few templates which can help you get started. A project is where everything will take place. For this article, I chose the novel template. Now, I cannot go deep into all the features of Scrivener but I will cover some cool features which make it best suited for long-form writing.